Archive for the ‘guild’ Tag

As usual I am ignoring the actual trends in the MMO sphere..especially SWTOR and write about something totally different. ;)

As I already mentioned I’ve considered to change the guild, because the old guild is dead. So I changed it last week and am now member of Erengrads Nachtwache. I’m not sure if I should translate it, but Nachtwache means something like Night Watch. Erengrad is obviously from Warhammer.

So here are some pics before change (with guild colors brown and grey) and after the change. I slightly shifted the color scheme with black, but imho it’s not that big optical change like it would be with other careers. I still like the black, red, gold theme of the armor.

The change isn’t that dramatic though, because I’ve already played together with some of EN (I’m lazy to write the guild name..sorry for that ;) ). The alliance is active though, so it’s easier now to get a free spot in a group and therefore I’m not always soloing around, but get to fight in a decent group. It’s definitely more fun that way.

All in all it was the right decision (uhh..I should have made a tv conference like LeBron James. *makes a note*), though it’s still an awkward situation when looking back at the remainders of Grimnirs Zorn. I still have a couple of alts in there, but maybe this will change too. Now the guild is officially dead as there is really no one there who’s active. Just a the alt’s of two of us. The third active member changed also to EN .. though this might get interesting..as he likes to grumble and curse.. and there are some guild in the alliance with people he really..well.. let’s say he doesn’t like them that much ;)

Before I continue with my series “What WoH can not deliver compared to WAR (or a proper MMO)”.. I write about a thing that’s affecting me currently in WAR.

In September (shortly after the WoH announcement) our guild suffered from a drop in membership. At first people just didn’t log in (as frequently as before) and then some subs ran out and weren’t renewed. This was emphasized because of the queasiness the stat-buffing pets caused.

This led to the guild being ..well..dead. We are currently only three active members, of whom two are only active at prime time ..and one of us two is in a premade from a different guild (which I can’t blame him for). So I’m more or less just soloing (and alting on Drakenwald or Badlands) or getting some invites from some friends to join their groups. As I’m just a fill-in I can’t rely on getting invites and so it happens quiet often that I’m running around solo for my whole gaming-session. And believe me … Drakenwald is not a server you would like to solo. Maybe WH’s and WE’s are an exception here ;)

After some weeks now I came to the decision that I have to change something. I will change the guild (at least with my main char) in the next days. This is something that I’m not doing often.

I know of several people who change quiet frequently the guild, because of several (valid) reasons. I was never that kind of person and I’m not even sure why. If I choose a guild then I stick with it for as long as it’s possible..If I remember correctly this is in 13 years of online gaming just the second time that I leave a guild..and both times it was because of the guild being dead and not because the game shut down.

Sometimes I think that IRL I’m more dwarf than my appearance might suggest.. I can grumble a lot, I’m often dealing with several sorts of noble metals.. and beer…I have a beard.. and if i join a guild I stay with it, no matter what it costs (ok ..that is not real life, but you know what I mean ;) ). But even though the guild is dead now I have some unpleasant feeling when I will leave the guild. Some sort of bad conscience even though there is no reason for it. We stay in contact through our guild forum and the folks even wondered why I’m still in the guild.

This is strange and there is no real explanation for it..it’s just my personality. Maybe I will understand it better in the next couple of days..so maybe there is a follow-up post on this topic.

Do you stick always to the same guild for as long as possible or are you switching more easily?

The guild I’m in has it highs and lows attendance-wise… We were never a big guild and we suffered a irregular cycle where we had trouble in building a group, because for an extended time only 2-3 people were online during prime time. Usually that took only some weeks and then it changed, so that we had 6 people online and were ready to fight. But for a longer period of time now we have problems with having enough people online.. To make things more trickier..the alliance we are in felt apart. Anyways ..it consisted only of premades who don’t want to mix that much or wanted only folks with rr90+. We don’t even have one char rr90+, so we lowered the average RR of the alliance and were now not even “attractive” because of our numbers ;)

Our playstyle is relaxed..but nonetheless we try our best and are quiet successful (keeping our RR in mind). It’s not about renown-grinding..it’s about killing stuff. So we tend to roam through the RvR-lakes and search for small scale fights. For this we need a full group of 6 members.. anything below 4 is pure frustration and even 4 or 5 is not that much fun. And there was/is the problem. We couldn’t always fill up our group from the alliance, so often we had only a too small group of 3-4 and there was some frustration because that and the RR disparity (and the issues connected to this) after patch. This is not a problem anymore, but it caused a base level of frustration which led to some frustration, decreasing motivation and therefore some just don’t log in. This lack of motivation is something that can’t be easily patched..

Because the last active guild left our alliance some weeks ago we can’t fill up our group from the alliance any more.. but that’s not the main problem. We rarely did it anyway. I think that this is a good motivation to do something. The whole guild realized that we have to do something so that this guild doesn’t fall apart. Even Svedrik is now advertising on /advice so that we can fill up our group. And quiet frankly..the last ..days/weeks went quiet positive when we did some RvR. We got some heavy beating..but it was not hopeless and we could give a good fight to some high-RR groups. I think that this raised the overall moral and motivation in the guild.

When this is stabilized the next step is the growth of the guild. This can be a quiet tricky thing, because we are a dwarf only guild and we are rather small (in numbers..not body height! ;) ), which may correlate ;)

How we plan to make the guild grow again will be a separate post and frankly it’s not quiet clear to me what is the most effective way ..but it needs to be done so that we have always (at prime-time) about 6 members ready to fight and don’t have to rely too much on strangers.

I’m sure that advertisement on waaagh.de and in the advice-channel will be part of our recruitment.. I will definitely report on how it’s going and what we are doing to recruit more dwarves. So stay tuned ;)